by Heather Ross
My grandmother died a few years later, and when I went to Mike’s to take him to her funeral—he had no working car now, no license, no insurance, and he and Jeannie were barely surviving on the mountain—we argued because they insisted on smoking in my car even though I had asked them not to. I wouldn’t have minded, but it was borrowed from friends who were sure to notice. “Goddamn it, Tupy,” he said, angry from the backseat. “This is Vermont. Everybody smokes here.” The only thing keeping him from using drugs to endure what seemed to be a miserable, inescapable event, I gathered, was that he was broke.
But when I saw him again, on that spring day years later when he was towing the evaporator, he seemed to have forgotten that memory and that he had been angry with me. He had been left a little bit of money by my grandfather who had died the previous fall, and he was using it to try to get his farm operational again. He was full of fresh hope, even though he was sick with the hepatitis C that he had already lived with for a decade, and he was thin and gaunt, almost all of the handsome gone, some of the teeth missing from his smile. He talked with his eyes wide and his hands held open toward me, in constant motion. They were rough and dirty, like his clothes, and he smelled of stale cigarettes, but he was clean. Jeannie came up behind him and said hello with a brusque, awkward hug, and immediately made a comment about my coat, which was warmer than hers, and then said something obnoxious about my car, which was a fancy rental ill-suited to these roads. I was actually a little surprised that I had made it up the road without snow tires, which I had insisted on when making the reservation but hadn’t been given at the airport. “Yes,” I said, “I told the lady at Hertz that I would probably total it.” Even after agreeing with her about both points, I remained, in her eyes, just one of the summer people, the relatives of Mike’s who came in their nice cars to stay at The Red House. It bothered me that, now that I had gone and come back, I was so easily dismissed as an outsider in this place. In this place. I offered to cook them both dinner at my mother’s house later that night.
I made a hearty soup and soft bread for dinner. Jeannie and Mike arrived after dark, in a new truck, after they had lost the daylight needed to work at the sugarhouse, which still didn’t have power but would soon. We sat around the small, round table. Mike talked about his plans for the coming spring and summer: His house would be rebuilt, his gardens would be producing fresh and canned goods, he would have horses again, I could come riding the next time I came. He was clean, he said, nothing but canned beer and cigarettes, and no junk, not anymore. And then Mike asked me if he had ever told me about the first time he had been high. It was when he was in boarding school, in Switzerland, where his parents had placed him at the age of five, just as World War II ended. The first time they left him there, they did not come back until Christmas. In later years, they stopped coming to visit him entirely. It was during one of these holidays, when he was left with limited supervision in an almost empty dormitory, the youngest not to have been called home for Christmas, that the older boys had refused to share their drinks with him, pushing him out into an empty hallway and telling him that he could go into the kitchen and find some nutmeg to smoke. “That was it,” he said, leaning back in his chair, a cigarette in one hand. “That was it.” I left the next morning at dawn, in a snowstorm, but I missed my flight because I crashed the rental car into a guardrail near Belvedere Bog. I had to sit in the Burlington airport for six hours, surrounded by literature about Vermont businesses and ads for maple syrup. That was when I began dreaming about a way to help Mike sell his syrup.
It was easy enough to get a meeting with the bulk foods buyer at the Arcata Co-op. My story was a good one: I was representing a small farmer who used traditional (if not primitive) methods. He was interested and gave me much more time and attention than I deserved, but he already had a supplier: Shady Maple Farms. This is where I crossed the line. “Shady Maple?” I said, eyebrows up and voice lowered to convey my corporate horror. “You do know about them, right?”
“No, what about them?” he asked. I had nothing. I was just hoping to hit a socially conscious nerve, hoping that there was something wrong with Shady Maple, some fact that he already felt guilty about but was knowingly ignoring. He stared back at me, waiting for the bad news about his trusted, longstanding supplier. “Let’s just say they put the shady in maple,” I said, nodding slowly and squinting a little. That did it. I had an order for fourteen massive plastic casks of my uncle’s maple syrup, which was what Mike said he could deliver. That was worth more than four thousand dollars. The fact that they would be buying and selling it in bulk was important; Mike wasn’t equipped to sterilize, fill, seal, and ship small bottles of syrup safely or profitably, so he needed a buyer who would take all of his syrup in these casks instead of fancy little bottles with labels.
It took me almost an hour to convince UPS to send a driver up the long dirt road to my uncle’s place to pick up all of that syrup, through all of that snow, carrying a check from me in the amount of four thousand dollars. Meanwhile, the co-op wanted a logo and company description for the store’s big wooden bulk container. I called Mike with the news and offered to make one. “OK, you can make a logo, but don’t give me that cutesy moose and cow crap,” Mike had said. “I want something real, something that shows what Vermont is really like.” We agreed that Mike’s was not a lifestyle that could or should be depicted on a bulk foods bin, so I went for humor instead and drew a little man carrying a tin bucket, humming as he walked through his woods, unaware of the massive, salivating black bear behind him. He loved it. He told me that when he first saw it, he laughed and laughed and laughed. My mother loved it, too. I consider this—making two rather cynical Vermonters laugh in what must have been March—to be a great personal artistic achievement. I told everyone in town, everyone that I knew, that the maple syrup in the bulk department at the co-op was from my family. My mountain. I didn’t let myself think about the fact that I had given Mike four thousand dollars, that he had just worked with very little sleep, for weeks, in the snow, splitting wood for and then tending the fires that needed to burn day and night to boil down all of that syrup, backbreaking work in freezing weather that would be followed by a period of nothing but waiting for spring, which, when you are an addict with four thousand dollars in your pocket, is likely more temptation, more justification, than you need to slip back onto familiar ground, to disappear, to rest, to let go of what you have, just for a moment.
When I talked to my mother the following Christmas, she told me that she and Mike had argued about something, that he and Jeannie were “up to their old tricks,” that they were desperate again. I ignored these clues and asked her if they were sugaring, but she couldn’t tell me. “Can you ask them?” I said. “Please?” Mike didn’t have a phone, so I was asking her to drive up to their place, which I knew she didn’t want to do. Mike called me a few days later from a pay phone. “Listen, Heather, I can get you syrup again, right?” his voice was gritty, strained, and tired. “But look, you know, you have to pay me something upfront, so I can get it made, and hey, if I was L.L. Bean, and you wanted some boots, well, you would have to send me the money first and then I’d send you the boots, right?” He had obviously been searching in his own blurry mind for a way to rationalize what he was doing, knowing that it was my money that I was sending, that the Arcata Co-op paid a month or so after it was shipped the syrup, and that it wasn’t enough to have the check arrive on the same day that the syrup was collected, that he needed it now, months in advance. I said I’d do it, and even though I set up a wire transfer, even though it took no more than two days for the cash to reach him, it didn’t come fast enough, and he called me again and again, sounding more and more desperate each time, from the bank parking lot, from the gas station, wanting to know where it was.
My mother called me a few weeks later, angry. She had lent him money, she said, at Christmastime, so that he could hire help to cut firewood and get set up to sugar, but now, when he was supposed to
be making syrup, he wasn’t. I told her that she was wrong, that the season hadn’t started yet, and she told me that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, that I was “fucking blind.” I hung up on her.
Mike’s syrup arrived, as promised, but it came in different casks, was packaged differently than before, and tasted different. There was less of it than there was supposed to be. Later, we learned that Mike had used the money my mother had given him to buy syrup from an old friend, a neighbor who had given him his lower-grade syrup at wholesale, which is what ended up in the bulk bins at the Arcata Co-op that year under the laminated sign that I had made. My money, I had to admit to myself now, had likely gone straight into his arm.
The following Christmas came and went, with no word from Mike. The next winter, my mother told me that he was sugaring again, with the help of a new neighbor who had just built a house on the road to his house, and whom she didn’t trust at all. I was too distracted by my own situation—my business was suffering and my relationship with John, my boyfriend, had hit the first of many rocky patches—to see if he wanted to try selling his syrup again. My mother was still angry about the money he hadn’t paid back.
John and I had decided to take a trip together, to a remote and rustic hotel in the Caribbean, which was how it came to be that when I got the call that Mike had died, I was sitting in bright, blinding sunshine. This made it all the more difficult, almost impossible, to imagine a man, thin and sick, dying alone in his hard-won sleep on the top of a snowy, dark mountain, in the middle of sugaring season, after days of getting no rest and working hard in the bitterly cold winter air.
It hurt too much to imagine, at that moment, in the sun, the way the bus must have looked that night, with the ruined stone house next to it, or the once-new truck, no longer running, parked nearby, all of it under several feet of snow. Or the long walk that Jeannie made after she found him, in the middle of the night, past the road that had led to the now-empty Red House, the abandoned and overgrown dome site, and Donald’s little tin shack. She’d walked a mile and a half in the dark, all the way through the woods to the neighbor’s house, all without the dogs, who wouldn’t leave Mike ’s side.
I can see it all now, clearly, in my mind. Enough years have gone by, and I’ve managed to accept it as the final chapter in a story about a place where we had all dreamt out loud.
HOW TO
save a drowning child
(part II)
MAURA WAS MY THERAPIST. Technically, she billed herself as an entrepreneurial advisor, which made it easier to tell John, my boyfriend of three years, that I was seeing her, since he and his family believed mental or emotional weaknesses to be the worst, most unerasable, irrevocable sort of stigma. He was young—six years my junior—and only partly American, his mother being from Sweden, and he came from a family that was good in every way except this one. While I could forgive them for it because I knew that the United States was unique in its obsessive embrace of mental maladies, and because I loved them, it was inconvenient because I really, really needed help.
Maura had been recommended to me by my good friend Wendy, who, like me, managed her own precarious business, a very popular, very good restaurant. We had been friends for almost as long as I had lived in Arcata. Not only had I made her wedding dress, but I had also bought it back from her for four dollars at her post-divorce yard sale a few years later. “Don’t take it too personally,” a mutual friend of ours said to me, holding up a pack of tarot cards, as we both stood in line to pay for our armloads of souvenirs from Wendy’s soon-to-be-former life. “I gave her these for her birthday last year.”
Wendy’s childhood had been about as unsteady as my own. “One time,” she told me over a bottle of wine, “we moved into a new house,” she took a sip of wine, “in the snow,” another sip, “without a car.” We could compare stories like these and, when our lives were going well, be proud of ourselves. When things were not going well, especially in our businesses, we told them to each other for a different reason: to commiserate, in some way, about how very lonely and vulnerable we felt and how frightening it was to be so utterly dependent on ourselves and no one else. We had both learned to take care of ourselves from terrible teachers, and we were attracted to crisis because it was familiar to us. When Wendy told me that Maura had helped her and that I could be helped, too, I believed her. I knew that Maura had assisted Wendy in righting and then selling her business and getting out of a marriage that seemed, from the outside, to be good but really was not.
I liked to pretend that the sofa in Maura’s office was one of the chaise lounges I had seen in psychiatrist’s offices in movies, even though it was a short, fluffy two-seater with big rolled arms from IKEA. I would lie on it with my legs hanging off the end closest to her face, my head flat on the seat cushion, staring up at her ceiling. I had learned by then that I was especially prone to visual distractions, that when it came to my brain’s ability to prioritize its competing stimuli, whatever I was looking at cut to the front of the frontal-lobe queue, and that staring at a blank white wall or ceiling was the only way I could think through complex problems. Maura would sometimes lean forward and put her forehead into my peripheral vision when she was making a point or confronting me about the problems that I seemed to be unable to make go away, which in her opinion were usually the ones (a) that required me to make big and difficult changes and (b) that I would probably repeat for the rest of my life. My main problems, it had become clear to both Maura and me after three or four months together, were that my relationship and my business, both of which had showed so much promise early on, were failing and were probably beyond saving. I was so deeply entrenched in both, so heavily invested in them, that without them I would be starting over with less than nothing. I would have no home—John and I lived together in a house that was in his name—and I would have no job, in a town with very few jobs for a … what was I? I couldn’t even imagine what I would do next. And then there were the cats. Just thinking about leaving them behind was enough to make me stay, even though I knew that staying for the cats was legitimately crazy.
My business was just barely staying afloat. We were successful in terms of our product—our collection of children’s clothing made from fabrics printed with my own designs was well received and sought after and even collected—but we were failing on nearly every other front. My partners had left, my debts were huge, and the printing houses, cut-and-sew factories, and wash houses that my manufacturing processes depended on were shutting down, one by one, in a final wave of blows to California’s apparel industry delivered via Enron and fallout from the bursting tech bubble. I had crossed almost every line I could think of. I’d sold my car to pay for a trade show, I’d dumped cartons of merchandise on discounters, I’d started trying to manufacture things in-house, marketing them as handmade. It had become my full-time job just to bring in enough cash to cover my monthly overhead. There was no time for design or development or thinking beyond the next pay period. Yet, somehow, this reality was an easier one to face, day by day, than accepting that I had actually failed. So I kept going. What frightened me most was this cycle that seemed to be repeating itself, beginning with nothing, building a life with someone, in a new place, and then feeling it begin to fail, watching it come apart. What, I would ask Maura, am I doing wrong?
John had never been in a real relationship before, which meant that he didn’t have enough experience to recognize two very important things about me: one, that being embarrassed by the things that your partner says and does in social settings is pretty standard, and two, that what we had between us was, on the scale of great love, pretty spectacular. I never doubted that he loved me because it was the sort of love that I could feel from across the room. I also knew, unfortunately, that he didn’t like me at all. I was not organized or neat enough, I didn’t take care of my things well enough, I paid too much for cheese, and I often smelled bad, by his standards. I was also too loud, talked too much, especially about my
self and my business, and asked too many personal questions. And my work, oh how he hated my work. He didn’t want to hear about how difficult my job was or how much stress I was under. Clearly, I had put myself in this position and my priorities were all wrong anyway, so why did I care so much? And why couldn’t I just work for someone else—did I think I was so special? And why did my job involve so much self-promotion? That was clearly a sign, he told me again and again, that I was insecure. Once, when we had made a terrible mistake and delivered flawed merchandise to a major catalog customer and they threatened to sue us for the lost income and the cost of printing the product in their catalog, I broke down on John, hoping that he would show me just the tiniest bit of empathy.
“I might be bankrupt,” I tried, and then, instantly afraid that this would make him want to leave me, reassured him by saying, “I guess it’s a good thing we aren’t married.”
“I wouldn’t be that stupid,” he said, and walked out of the room.
I understood that he was tired of it; I was tired of it, too. But it wasn’t just the lows that he wasn’t interested in sharing; he didn’t seem to care about the highs, either. In fact, they were just as embarrassing to him. One of the few things that I had become very good at was drawing with a computer stylus. This skill translated beautifully in exactly one instance outside of my job: Pictionary. I could draw, of course, but more importantly, I could draw without looking at exactly what I was drawing. John and I played Pictionary together one night with our close friends Tim and Lisa. Tim’s older brother, TC, was visiting, so we were two uneven teams. I drew, with my eyes averted, a near-perfect frying pan. Tim and Lisa applauded even though they weren’t on my team. TC was especially impressed. John scowled at me the whole way home. “I don’t know why you always have to show off,” he said, and then, as if on cue, still staring ahead at the road, “My mom thinks it’s because you are insecure.”